Thursday, March 20, 2008

A few observations

I'd like to introduce a couple of new quantities into the science of the workplace. Firstly, I'd like to define a quantity I term the wanker density. This is the number of wankers per capita of the workforce, and should be measured in parts-per-hundred (pph). For example, one might say that a place-of-work with a wanker density of 50pph has quite a high wanker density. In this context, I define a wanker-at-work to be an uncooperative, obnoxious or devious individual, prone to serving his/her own self-interest at the expense of others. Different workplaces, of course, will have different wanker densities, and the level of frustration encountered in working for a particular company is a function of the wanker density.

The second quantity I'd like to define is what I dub the committed effective resentment equivalent. This is defined analogously to the committed effective dose equivalent, which measures the cumulative dose of radiation received over a lifetime if a radionuclide is taken into the body. The committed effective resentment measures the cumulative resentment acquired by employees who stay at the same company for much of their working lifetime, and who, over those decades, deposit geological layers of resentment towards their employers and work colleagues. I propose that the SI unit of committed effective resentment be termed the twat. Thus, work colleagues who are only slightly unpleasant, but who, nevertheless, spend much of their time bitching about the way they've been treated, could be said to have, say, 20 twats of committed effective resentment. Other colleagues, who might be described as rogue employees, being obnoxious, devious, disruptive, provocative, and even prone to acts of downright sabotage, might be said to have about 500 twats of committed effective resentment.

2 comments:

Selena Dreamy said...

In all this, one can detect not just the gratuitous scorn of the devious, disruptive, provocative rogue employee, but also the suppressed rage and resentment of the misused “workhouse boy“, cripplingly conscious of his own "base origins". An English worker, accordingly, will come with the committed effective resentment equivalent of an attitude and carry his grudge like a battlescar - livid with a strong sense of them and us, born out of centuries of poverty and deprivation. The fact of the matter is, that England has never recovered from the Norman yoke which taught the lower orders to be ashamed of their roots and who, in our time, display a traditional sense of grievance against the ruling elite. And because of residual class rivalry and the hereditary snobbery of the “feudal employer“, there is little love lost between the wankers-at-work and those whom they perceive to be their exploiters.

Which only goes to prove that our concept of who we are and what we want to be, is determined by the attitude we take, for the only difference in the wankers where I work, is that most of them are left-handed.

Dreamy

Gordon McCabe said...

You're just saying what we were all thinking, Selena.